Now, is it really the final countdown? Sort of – it’s the beginning of a longer final countdown as compared to usual. We still have a couple weeks until our final learning summaries are due, but our course prototype is just around the corner! Can you believe it?

However, I will admit, putting every piece together now, in this final stage, is more difficult than I initially thought. I know how I want my lessons to go, and I know how and why I will be using certain tools and resources, and I know how I will be achieving the outcomes of the Social Studies 30 course. Writing all of this down, explaining it for a third party to understand, and organizing all the information properly in Google Classroom so that another person can get a sense of my plans is a much larger undertaking than I thought. Especially seeing as the course will be blended, I am assuming that during the actual course, many elements will be shared during the Zoom Conference Sessions, something that can’t be truly be emulated without that type of interaction.

There are also all the little details that are left – like posting the assignments on Google Classroom in the proper order (there isn’t a function on Google classroom to reorganize the tasks, unless you want to put an assignment at the very top of the list, which is what I needed to do when I missed an important assignment for the middle of my course module). I also kept putting off translating my assignments, as I had created a large majority of them in French for my current students. I therefore had to translate these assignments and rubrics into English for this course. I don’t know if any of you often translate things from one language to another, but I find it tedious and not a personal strength – which is probably why I put it off for so long!

Nearing the end of this course prototype, one of the key elements I have left is to check all of my links to make sure they, first of all, link up to the right document, and secondly that they are all in English. Finally, I need to make sure they are accessible to everyone who has the link. On Google Docs, the default setting is for people to access the documents if it has been shared with them, so I will need to double-check to ensure that I have changed the settings so everyone has access to the documents if they have access to the link. Then I won’t be getting a lot of e-mails of people asking me for access to my Google Docs!

The final step is evidently getting together with Katherine to go over our course together and making sure we are somewhat aligned. I will admit (hopefully you agree with me Katherine…) that we misunderstood the assignment from the start. We ended up dividing up the entire Social Studies curriculum together, making a profile for that course. Afterwards, we divided the modules and each took one, which we subsequently elaborated individually – Katherine took unit 2 and I took unit 4. Finally, within these units, we each took a lesson to develop further. Consequently, we have gone in different directions because of the outcomes for our units, and we developed somewhat different courses, depending on the activities planned. Therefore, we really need to discuss our pathways this week and organize our two units as much as possible together. We are planning on creating one Google Doc that will house every link necessary for our unit, and organizing this Google Doc in order of how students would work through our documents. This Google Doc will be posted in the About page on Google Classroom, making it easily accessible. We hope we can organize it so a third party understands it easily without us having to explain it to them – I am finding this to be the most difficult challenge and hurdle with this course prototype!

So, as a summary, the final stages in putting together our course prototype include:

Ensure that the details and organization make sense from a third party.

Finalizing the little details i.e. order of assignments on Google Classroom, translate all necessary documents in English, etc.

Make sure links work

Make sure links are accessible

Get together with Katherine and discuss how our two modules will look together.

What have I missed? Just like nearing the end of any module or unit, I feel as though there are details that I haven’t thought of yet – hoping there aren’t too many before I receive some of your feedback next week!

Looking forward to seeing all of your prototypes. And, don’t forget, it’s the Final Countdown:)

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8 Responses to It’s the Final Countdown

Haha, thanks Liz, I will inevitably have that song in my head all day!

Sounds like your project is really coming together. Like you, I feel like a lot of this week is the “dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s”. Making sure links work the way we expect them to, giving appropriate access within the documents that we are sharing and so on.

It’s funny how far we’ve come in a short time, when we started this project, I was (quite frankly) dreading it. Now that we have had the time to consider things from many different facets, and we have a ‘completed’ project – I’m excited for someone to try it out and give some feedback. I’m also really looking forward to seeing what everyone has created!

I share a lot of the same feelings, excitement, nervousness and accomplished all at once. It’s a little intimidating knowing that we need to publish and have it go live so that others can view it, but that’s also exciting because it will be great to see them all come together.

I’m sure you and Katherine have done a fantastic job and I think you seem to know what you need to do to finalize before Tuesday. The final countdown is among us!